


Miracle

by Accal1a



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Angst and Feels, Angst with a Happy Ending, Boys In Love, Boys Kissing, Epic Friendship, Late Night Conversations, M/M, Time Travel Fix-It
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-08
Updated: 2021-01-08
Packaged: 2021-03-10 23:35:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,182
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28385607
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Accal1a/pseuds/Accal1a
Summary: Eliot and Margo have a serious conversation, and are interrupted by the best person possible.
Relationships: Margo Hanson & Eliot Waugh, Quentin Coldwater/Eliot Waugh
Comments: 14
Kudos: 53
Collections: Peaches and Plums Stockings 2020





	Miracle

**Author's Note:**

  * For [stormcoming](https://archiveofourown.org/users/stormcoming/gifts).



> Merry Winter! I hope you like it!
> 
> I played fast and loose with canon, so bear with me. :)

Fillory was Eliot's home.

It had been such for many years now; but what do you do when your home physically hurts you to be in it? What do you do when every breath, every blade of grass, every room, every _thing_ reminds you of a lost love that almost never was?

He couldn't go back to Earth, couldn't be away from where he had done so much growing up, but some days he could barely breath with the loss in Fillory.

Quentin should be here, next to him, ruling this whimsical, crazy land. They should live and grow old together, like they had in the mosaic quest. They should have a lifetime, and all they had was some stolen moments. Sometimes Eliot wasn't sure they had existed at all.

A kiss here.

A one night stand there.

Handholding without thought.

Stolen glances.

Were they just wishful thinking on his part, or had they actually happened? He couldn't remember anymore. Would it be better or worse to know for sure? He didn't know that anymore either.

The day he passed a tapestry in the castle that had a scene of hunting that he and Quentin had once made fun of, making up stories as to who was hunting whom in the picture, was the day he finally broke.

The debate had raged for an hour, them laughing and yet seriously considering the matter at the same time. If the Centaur's were sentient and could use weapons, then surely humans weren't hunting them? But then the humans were on horseback with bows, so perhaps they had been? Factor in the walking trees and the hawks? (they'd never really worked out what they were supposed to be, but they sort of looked like birds of prey…if you squinted…and ignored the extra set of wings). In any case it was a stupid scene, and one that they had oft commented on.

For some reason that was the straw that broke the camel's back for Eliot.

That one stupid tapestry was what opened the flood gates of his soul. It hadn't been the peaches that he could no longer bear to eat. It wasn't the vests he saw that he couldn't wear anymore because they were Quentin's favourites. It wasn't the comments and in-jokes in their friendship group, the pauses in which Quentin would say something conspicuous due to its absence. It wasn't every time he did a spell that he knew Quentin had done with him at one time or another.

No, it was that stupid fucking tapestry.

He sank to the floor, head and back leaning against the opposite stone wall, his long legs crowded to his chest as he gasped for breath, memories of Quentin spinning around in his head so fast he was getting dizzy from his own thoughts. Then he remembered that Quentin often sat like that, with his arms wrapped around his legs and curled up into a ball, as if by scrunching himself up he could banish the demons within and without. No, Eliot couldn't sit like that, he would break far more than he had before.

He kicked his legs out in front of him, headless of the servant who walked past and nearly tripped over him.

He felt the tears starting to well behind his eyes and he angrily wiped at them hoping that would stop them from falling.

He wasn't successful.

He was so fucking tired. He'd had heartache before, but that had been break ups, that had been incomparable to the gaping hole in his chest, the feeling that there was something missing in his life that he would never get back.

"God _damnit_!" He shouted to no-one, before he rested his head against the wall, closing his eyes and letting his body weep at the loss.

A little while later, he heard a voice that he knew as well as his own. "El?"

"Bambi." Eliot croaked. At some point the tears had just leaked out of his eyes, and he hadn't bothered to wipe them. He probably looked like shit, but he couldn't bring himself to care.

A diplomat attempted to walk down the corridor after Margo, and she stopped him with a look. "This corridor is _closed_ for the foreseeable future. Spread the news around!"

"But…"

"Did I stutter? Get it done. _Now_."

The wonderful thing about Margo, Eliot mused, was that she rarely actually raised her voice in anger. Instead she spoke with purpose, with vigour, and with a surety that made people follow her orders even before they realised they were doing it. She had always been this way, as long as he'd known her, and he thought it was one of her more stellar qualities.

Right now, he couldn't adequately explain how much he appreciated it. He wasn't getting up off this floor any time soon.

"El." Margo said softly as she gracefully sat on the floor too, arranging her eccentric Fillorian clothes around herself.

"He's gone, Margo." Eliot said quietly. "Just _gone_. I had been taken for so long, and I fought to get back to you guys, I promise I did."

"I know, El." Margo continued in the same soft voice, putting her hand on Eliot's arm, hoping that would give him some strength.

"And when I got back, I barely got to talk to him, and then Everett…I never…fuck, Margo we have been through so much _shit_ the last few years, and after all of this, after _everything_ the best of us died."

"Well maybe not the be—" Margo started, but stopped when she saw the look on Eliot's face. It wasn't time yet for self-deprecating jokes. "Sorry."

Eliot smiled wanly at her., he wouldn't change her humour for the world, but he was too broken right now to appreciate it. "I'm just…how am I supposed to live with this? How do I live with the guilt?" He finished on a whisper, as if the secret would take flight as a tangible creature they would have to fight.

"This wasn't your fault, El."

Eliot wrenched his arm away from Margo then, standing with little coordination before starting to pace before that monstrosity of a tapestry.

"Everyone keeps saying that! It's not your fault the monster picked you, Eliot." He said in a mocking tone of voice, gesturing widely with his hands. "It's not your fault that you weren't strong enough to wrest power from the fucking thing, Eliot. It's not your fault that people died, many people whilst you were stuck in there, able to see everything that was happening, Eliot. Not your fault. Not your fault. Not your fault. But they don't know that do they? What if I asked for this? What if the monster picked me because I was the weak link? What if I could have got out sooner? What if I could have got out in time to fix this _before_ he died? What if—" Eliot concluded, then cast a spell so fast Margo barely saw his hands move.

The tapestry went up in carefully controlled flames. Against stone walls and with the next tapestry far enough away, it extinguished quickly.

"Feel better?" Margo asked, watching burnt pieces of fabric fall to the floor like so much black snow.

"Not really." Eliot said, sinking to the floor next to her again, all fight seeming to have fled from him.

"You are Eliot fucking Waugh." Margo said firmly. "You did everything you could. _We_ did everything we could. Sometimes people die and it—"

"I swear to God if you say it's all part of a plan." Eliot said tiredly, his heart not really in the statement. He didn't want to argue with Margo anyway. He knew that she did perhaps more than anyone else to get him back. She'd licked a lizard for fuck's sake.

"I was going to say, sometimes people die and it fucking sucks, but we can get through this, you're one of the strongest—" A movement out of the corner of her eye stopped what she was saying, and she did a double take, the confusion evident on her face enough to make Eliot turn too.

"Q?" Margo asked in disbelief, shocked at the man standing not 10 ft away from where they were sitting on the floor.

Eliot whipped his head around so much it spun slightly, staring at the man they had been talking about, the man who was _dead_. Had they manifested him somehow?

Margo turned to Eliot. "You see him too, right?

"Yes." Eliot breathed, not daring to believe it was true that Quentin was standing near him. If he turned out to be a ghost, or a shade, or any number of fucked up things that life had thrown at him since coming to Brakebills, he thought he might lose it and never find his sanity again. He would welcome it. Welcome the descent into an abyss he could never claw his way up from. Maybe it would be peaceful there. Maybe he would finally be able to rest.

He somehow found his way to his feet, and took a tentative step towards Quentin, then stopped. He wasn't sure what the etiquette was for suddenly meeting a friend? boyfriend? lover? after many months of thinking they were dead.

Thankfully, Quentin took the decision away from him, walking towards him with decisive steps, and pulling him into a hug that felt very real.

"It's been 300 years, Q." El whispered brokenly. "How? Are you real? Please tell me you're real."

"I'm real." Quentin said with a crooked smile that Eliot couldn't help but kiss off his face.

Quentin hummed when Eliot moved his lips away, his eyes still closed. When he opened them again, all he saw was Eliot's brown eyes, and the love reflected back there.

"It turns out that piecing yourself back together isn't _a_ minor mending. It's years and years and years of minor mendings. I got here as soon as I could."

Eliot laughed, fresh tears spilling down his face. "Fuck, Q. I've missed you." He said, and it was the understatement of three centuries.

"I thought of you every…well I didn't really have days…but all the time. I knew I had to mend my way back to you." Quentin whispered, pulling Eliot closer to him again, one hand around his waist and another on his cheek.

Eliot didn't know how long they stood there, in each other's arms, just staring, holding something they never thought they'd get to have again.

"Oh, get a room!" Margo said, with characteristic biting wit.

Quentin laughed, looking around Eliot to see his friend.

"Glad to have you back, Q." She said, smiling. "Now go. You carry on staring at each other in the corridors like that you'll fuse a love spell to the walls, and we don't need to deal with that shit on top of everything else."

Quentin smiled, looking back at Eliot.

There was a beat of silence, and then Quentin cast worried eyes on Eliot. "What are you guys dealing with?"

Eliot didn't want Quentin anywhere near trouble, hopefully for the rest of his life. He knew that was impossible, Quentin was who he was, he would always be the unlikely hero, but he was also Eliot's and Eliot refused to let him go again.

"It'll keep." Margo said to Quentin's quizzical look. "Go. Before I throw you in the dungeons!"

Quentin frowned at Eliot. "Can she do that? She's not Ki—"

"Try it, Coldwater!"

"Best not to test her." Eliot said, pulling Quentin along by his hand towards the suite of rooms he was using.

Quentin stumbled a little as he was pulled along, and it was such a Quentin-like gesture that Eliot had to stop and press him against the nearest wall and kiss him breathless.

When Eliot pulled back, his forearms on the wall with Quentin's head in between, he stared down into the other man's eyes and said something that had been welling up inside him for a long time. Sometimes he wondered whether it had been true the moment he had met Quentin – not that he believed in that sort of thing.

"I love you, Q."

Quentin's lips quirked up into a smile, and answered in the only way a geek could. "I know."

Eliot couldn't help but smile and then kiss the man again before pealing him off the wall and dragging him along by his hand. "Bedroom?" He asked, suddenly a little self-conscious.

Quentin tugged Eliot to a stop, turning him until Eliot was now the one leaning against a wall. "I love you too, El. I think I always have."

Eliot smiled, and it was as if something had settled in his stomach. A hole that had been tangible and vacuous had closed, patched together with the love of this complicated, amazing man in front of him.

He kissed Quentin one more time then pushed off the wall, taking Quentin's hand again and walking down the corridor, right into their new life together.

It was perfect.

**Author's Note:**

> Fancy joining a multi-fandom Discord server where you can ~~squee with~~ chat with like minded people? Have I got the place for you!
> 
> Come and join **The Fandom Playhouse**. You don't have to be mad to [join](https://discord.gg/82pvdE39fD), but it does help...


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